Not quite a Fantasy Halloween

With the girls in make-do costumes, we toured the island yesterday looking for a neighborhood where we'd be comfortable trick-or-treating. Unfortunately, KW is looking a lot like Slidell did, with houses gutted into piles on the streets. Would you let your kid beg candy at a home where they've lost most of their belongings? No.

Needing an alternate plan, we pulled into a drugstore and bought some bags of candy ourselves. Then we headed for Duvall Street and handed it out to the kids we encountered. This is probably the quietest Halloween Duvall Street has seen in 40 years. They've postponed Fantasy Fest (KW's Mardi Gras) until early December, so there weren't many people down there. We did see a few wild costumes and the usual weird mix of people that seems to be standard for Key West (degenerates, yuppies, retirees, very few families, very few minorities). Clothing is optional during Fantasy Fest, but the only thing we saw of the (in)famous body-painted Conchs was very impressive photos in a shop window.

Handing out candy was fun, though. The kids we gave to positively lit up. It wasn't much of a Halloween for them either, I think.

After our tour of Duvall, we bought key lime sherbet (ice cream in Frank's case) at a little shop and sat outside in shirtsleeves enjoying that. It was a very pleasant evening. The rain didn't start until we got back to the boat, and the BOY did it rain. Hard drumming all night long. We had to get up a few times to deal with leaks and clean out the Wilma rubbish in the cockpit drains because it started to fill.

This morning, the town is drowned again. We had to negotiate several lakes to make it to the Internet cafe.

We are pretty tired of all this, and we're contemplating going home. More on that later after we've talked it out.

KQR